Build mobile cross-automation with Fastlane

At Whitesmith, we like to get quality right from the first time and to guarantee that we use some common practices that have gained a lot of traction over the last few years: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.

Those practices help us on removing long time repetitive tasks using automation as first class citizen. They also force us writing good tests for our code.

CI&D as a Service

We knew the answer passed by using a CI&D as a Service. But then we got another dilemma: Which service to use for our CI and CD process?

Fortunately, there are many services for this task - some of them in an early stage, some others reliable but outdated for current needs. It is a tough decision, but we definitely wanted something with Android and iOS support that included fast runners/virtual machines updates.

Introducing Fastlane 1.0

The answer that we found for the two dilemmas is Fastlane. A perfect tool for cross-automation because it allows us to:

build one unique deployment flow with different pipelines

eliminate our repetitive tasks

publish more frequent and smaller releases

any person can release updates

Briefly, each flow on Fastlane is defined with a lane. It is possible to setup each lane with actions. There is a list of actions where it is possible to test, build or submit an app and much more like add_git_tag, increment_version_number, etc.

After defining a lane with the common iOS app deployment actions, the only step to do is executing the Fastlane file and nothing more 🚀. So, if you use CircleCI with the CI&D flow defined with Fastlane, then you can run the same flow on another service. You just need to guarantee the same Fastlane version on both services and you are done.

Fastlane + Twitter Fabric

Fastlane is now part of Fabric, a software development kit, and it is great news because it gives Fastlane a future development guaranty. Another neat part: Fastlane has started supporting Android as well.

Fastlane

Stay tuned on our next article about - How we setup our Qold app with Fastlane. Follow us on twitter and if you have any question, just shoot us a tweet.